Whoa, Horsey.

Back in 2007 I was diagnosed as having the lovely Fibrocystic Breast Disease. Basically, I have bumpy boobs. And it sucks. After a weekend (which felt like a YEAR!) of tearing my hair out, popping out tears and screaming and shouting, I had a breast biopsy. You may be wondering why I went so crazy before this procedure, as for me it was quite simple: get numb, needle in the boob, cool u/s pics, blah, blah, blah... but it was the words I NEVER wanted to hear from my doc after having a u/s of my breast: Solid nodule. It scared the wits out of me. And I heard the words at pretty much straight-up 5pm, on a Thursday afternoon. It couldn't get better than that.

This is one of the things I love about my DH (fiance at the time of this disaster)- he has a calming way about him. He was able to put me at ease like *this* (snaps fingers) and let me cry, scream, and have a fit, right there on his shoulders. I was utterly terrified of the C word.

Back to the main story line... the biopsy came back benign. Thank God. I was (and still am, knock wood... plan to stay that way!) cancer-free. But the doc had a caveat for me- stay away from the caffeine. At the time, I was so addicted to caffeine that 70 cups of coffee a day didn't touch me. (OK, slight exaggeration there. ;) ) I took what I thought was the easy-way out: I quit cold-turkey. A couple of days later, I had headaches- the kind that made me just want to give up and go have a few make-up Jolt colas. But I kept on keeping on, and two weeks later I felt much better again- like a human being. I was awake once again and my co-workers began filling me in on what had happened over the past several days. I slowly began allowing myself caffeine again, here and there about another week later.

This incident inspired me to do some research as to exactly how much caffeine is in any given drink at any given time. I thoroughly researched the drinks I frequented, and thought I had a grasp on it all- supposedly the amount of an ingredient in something can be somewhat-deciphered by where it is in the ingredient label of its product. For example, take a can of soda, read the label. Then pick up its diet counterpart, and do the same thing. According to that wisdom, the diet soda would have less caffeine in it since caffeine is mentioned more toward/at the end of the ingredient list, as opposed to the beginning/middle.

Well I sure was shocked tonight when I went online to research the amount of caffeine in iced tea and decided to look up diet soda as well. Apparently I need to just stock up on the iced tea and forget the soda- because diet and regular have the same amount of jolt juice in them- which is more than iced tea AND a Hershey Bar, combined! eek. There are a ton of these charts online and believe me, I have looked at several. And they all pretty much agree on the caffeine content of drinks/foods, within about 5-10mg of each other.

Here's one to get started on. Siroter votre boisson.